The German Heiress by Anika Scott

Author:Anika Scott [Scott, Anika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Water

Nighttime, and Willy was squatting by the river filling the ten-liter jug. He’d rolled up the arms of his coat and thrust his hands under the water and held them there as the jug bubbled and blubbered, filling up. He wanted it done fast. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, it was the air. It felt as though something was coming, a hard, sharp wind that stung his ears and made his nose drip.

He dragged the jug out of the flow and then dried his hands on his coat. They felt stiff, and the wind made them worse. It hurt when he bent his fingers. It was like the drills in winter. Boys lined up outdoors, at attention. He was just a Pimpf, a measly little kid, back then, and the group leader had it in for him.

All together, they had to chant in the cold: Boys of the Jungvolk are hard, silent, and true. Boys of the Jungvolk are comrades. The highest virtue of Jungvolk boys is honor.

Over and over again, shouting it into the freezing mist around them while his toes went numb and then the tip of his nose and then everything else. He’d had a sore throat and a cough and he couldn’t shout like the others. The group leader didn’t like that at all. He stopped in front of Willy and screamed at him.

“A soldier doesn’t cough!”

Willy had tried to swallow the tickling in his throat, but he was shaking, his nose blocked. The longer he tried to shout, the more he lost his voice until the group leader motioned for everybody else to be quiet.

“Listen to him,” he said with a smirk.

Willy chanted as best he could, but he sounded like a croaking frog. The group leader laughed, and that was the signal for the other boys to laugh too.

They were always laughing at him. Pointing at him. Willy is small. Willy is weak. Willy is a mama’s boy—because he liked to go to the shops with her and carry her packages and stand in the lines alongside her. Sometimes she had things on her mind and seemed to barely know he was there. But sometimes she chatted with him and asked his opinion about what she should cook. Sometimes she smiled at him in a warm, easy way. It was worth hours at the hair salon or the grocer’s for the chance that she would smile at him like that.

When he got home from the drill, she had wrapped him in blankets and sat him by the stove and fixed him tea and soup. He didn’t tell her what had happened but she seemed to sense it. She kept running her fingers through his hair, the warm tips along his skull. She was there beside him, asking him what he needed, but she kept looking at her watch, and again, worriedly, at the clock on the wall. Because she had to go out. Just for a while. “Will you be all right, little one?”

She shouldn’t have called him that.

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